The NYBG Wonderland
Where Wonderland Came to Life…
The Context
The NYBG Wonderland exhibit was already one of the city's most ambitious floral installations — but for a private industry event hosted by Jordan Kahn Music Company, the visual environment alone wasn't enough. The audience was wedding and event professionals: people who produce spectacle for a living and can spot the difference between a well-dressed room and a genuinely realized world. The brief was to animate the space in a way that matched its scale and imagination.
The Approach
Astarte built a cast of 40+ performers across three intentional layers. Narrative character actors — Alice, the Red Queen, the Mad Hatter, the White Rabbit — moved through the crowd as fluid hosts, creating spontaneous story moments with guests. Cirque specialists (a chair-balancing Cheshire Cat, partner acrobats, a knife-juggling Knave) served as punctuation: high-impact spectacle timed to stop the room. A third ambient layer — stilt-walking rosebushes, rabbit illusion dancers, flamingo showgirls, living roses — kept every corner of the space alive without demanding attention.
We took an editorial approach to costume design, built around detailed style cards executed consistently across the full cast by a dedicated hair and makeup team. An on-site choreographer directed movement throughout the evening to keep each character's physical presence calibrated to the tone of the space.
The Outcome
For a room full of event professionals, the measure of success isn't whether something looks good — it's whether the seams show. They didn't. The Wonderland activation demonstrated our capacity to produce large-format immersive entertainment at institutional scale, coordinating character performance, physical theatre, and ambient artistry within a single cohesive vision.
